Far from concerned, the FBI expresses support for an industry push for a widely accepted Internet wiretap.

Internet service providers looking to sidestep the controversy surrounding the FBI's Carnivore system for sniffing
Internet communications will soon be able to use an open-source program that also conforms to the needs of law
enforcement.

Last week, security software maker Network ICE Corp. quietly released an open-source version of a piece of its
own software capable of sifting through traffic on a network.

"Network ICE feels that the privacy debate is extremely important," the company stated on its Web
site. "Carnivore itself isn't important - the fact that we allow the government heavy-handed access to our
private data is the real issue."

Dubbed "Altivore", the source code conforms to the features of Carnivore as described in the FBI's
recent solicitation for independent review of its program.

According to Network ICE, the FBI had requested that any university that wanted to review the software verify
that it:

monitors suspect's e-mail (either headers or full content),

monitors suspect's access to certain types of servers, including Web and FTP servers,

copies all packets to and from the suspect's IP address, and

discovers the suspect's Internet address (when assigned by the ISP) by communicating with the provider's infrastructure.

The program currently only consists of source code and may be buggy, the company said on its Web site.

However, Robert Graham, chief technology officer for the San Mateo, Calif. company, believes that the open-source
community will quickly get the code ship-shape, as well as add new features to it.

"Many ISPs may want to use this," Graham said. "It could be a competitive advantage to be able
to say that Carnivore is not on your system." He added that a major and minor ISP have expressed interest
in using the program.

"We have really been saying since day one that the (Internet service providers) can do their own intercepts
if they have the capability and the willingness to testify in court," said Paul Bresson, a spokesman for the
federal agency.

Far from being a system that the FBI hoped to force providers to use, "Carnivore was created to help out
ISPs," he added.

So far, the open-source community has largely remained silent on the source code.

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